“I don’t see how [McCain] wins the Republican nomination. I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues – including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech – he’s not one of us,” – Kathryn Jean Lopez

If that’s what conservatism has mutated into, you can include me out. As with the Dem devotion to abortion, the Right’s dalliance with torture is no longer played as an ugly thing they are ashamed to name and in a hurry to deny with euphemism. I can remember how Linda Chavez telescoped the whole Faustian process in her column a few years ago” torture. She began by calling for “rational debate” and ended with a demand that we get over our squeamishness and get on with the safe, legal and rare torture. Some of you may remember the Dems following a similar process a few years earlier with another embrace of evil.

So now, for those who wish to be “one of us” according to the canons of what used to be a conservative journal, the first thing you must embrace is not free speech, low taxes, the dignity of the individual, nor smaller government. No the first thing that makes you one with the alleged standard bearer of conservatism is zealous defense of Caesar’s power to torture. And in this day and age, that means Caesar’s power to torture anybody he deems an illegal combatant.

And this swinish definition of conservatism as prostitution to the power of Leviathan is used to exclude a man who heroically endured torture at the hands of the Viet Cong.